


Firelight

by athena_crikey



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-28 02:42:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athena_crikey/pseuds/athena_crikey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They shelled us at Cassino – smelled just like this, mud and grit and smoke."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Firelight

The gravel crunches underfoot with every step, punctuating their progress down the alleyway no matter how carefully they try to advance. The buildings they’re skulking between have none of the graceful lines and symmetry of the colleges; they cut across the darkened sky like a crazy quilt, all crooked lines and jagged edges. There’s a pervasive smell of smoke and over-heated metal hanging heavy in the air even though the factories all locked up for the night hours ago.

Morse trips on the edge of a pothole and knocks into the brick wall beside him, the rough surface scraping harshly against the wool of his winter coat. He makes a low sound of irritation; up ahead, Thursday’s flashlight stops and skates around to shine on him. He waves off the unspoken question and pulls away from the wall to continue on, shoes rasping over the unpaved ground.

Spread through three rambling blocks in Oxford’s industrial heart tonight are four patrols of coppers. Somewhere in the same three blocks an industrial saboteur is hiding, possibly even in the burnt-out ruins of one of his competitors’ buildings. It’s a simple question of which will occur first: escape or discovery.

The night is a cold one, but Morse is almost glad of it – the cool crispness of the air cuts away some of the smokestack reek. In any case it isn’t cold enough to freeze, and his brisk pace keeps the warmth in under his coat. A few yards in front of him, Inspector Thursday reaches the end of the brick storehouse and pauses, waiting. Morse’s mental map of this part of town is fuzzy at best, despite several trips to examine the apparently accidental fire sites, later reclassified as arsons. He thinks they should have reached an empty lot adjacent to one of the burnt-out buildings, just more potholes and gravel piles with a few odds and ends dumped about. 

“Ready?” asks Thursday quietly, his light shining back over Morse’s shins to allow the peripheral illumination to show his face without blinding. Morse nods.

They stride out together into what is indeed the empty lot, moving nearly back-to-back to rake their flashlights over opposite sides of the open space. Last night’s rain has turned the looser ground here into mud, slick and sucking underfoot. Morse’s eyes rip hurriedly over the shadowy expanse, scouring the darkness behind the gentle gravel mound to his right and the scattered row of ancient oil drums to his left. 

Something sparks in his memory, a mental image of the lot as it was in the rainy afternoon the day before. Uneven ground split open by weeds, some rusting chasses of indeterminable origin lying against one wall, cement blocks lying forgotten. There hadn’t been any oil drums. 

Behind him, Morse hears a shoe turn on gravel and skids around himself just in time to see a tiny orange light flare several yards behind Thursday. 

A second later the oil drum nearest the alley they entered from explodes. 

The fire rips up through the night with an incredible thunderclap, lighting the entire expanse of the lot for an instant in searing red before dying back to a still-huge licking mess of flame. Morse stares at the remains of the drum from an instinctive half-crouch, shocked and partially blinded. A tiny, rushing river of flame is pouring across the dirt, towards – 

He doesn’t have time to move before the second drum explodes. In the wake of the explosion, he only partially makes out the shadow moving towards him before it careens into him, hitting him in the gut and tackling him backwards with relentless force. 

Morse knows he’s falling even as he knows it’s too late to do anything about it – everything seems to hang in the air for an eternity while he tries to brace himself. He knows what has to happen, imagines it several times in that split second, but knows he will never actually be able to move in time. 

Then he’s hitting the ground hard, left hip and shoulder first, the impact jarring most of the sense out of him. Almost simultaneously an immense weight lands on him, crushing the air from his lungs and pining him down on his stomach in the cold mud.

Then the third drum explodes.

In the aftermath of his body’s immediate desperate twisting to secure the room to breathe, he realises that it’s Thursday who’s on top of him. This is because Thursday shakes his shoulder, hard, and yells, “Stay down, you daft bugger,” in his ear.

A fourth drum goes up. It is more of a footnote than anything else in Morse’s world at that moment – he’s just found the space to breathe by hunching his shoulders, is sucking in the air deep and damn the pain. After a moment of gasping silently, he realises he isn’t actually silent: his ears are ringing, drowning out background noise. It’s that realisation more than anything else that helps to anchor him, helps him stack up the facts in his mind to make some sense of his sudden descent into chaos. He sees in his mind’s eye the oil drums, rigged to explode when set alight. A line of four, spaced out at wide intervals.

“There were only four, sir,” he shouts, looking the wrong way and face half-buried in mud.

Thursday doesn’t release his hold on Morse’s shoulder, doesn’t shift the weight that’s still crushing more than half Morse’s back. His voice in Morse’s ear is hoarse and commanding. “They’re trying to draw us out; stay down.”

Morse rolls his head to look at Thursday, face scraping painfully against the grit beneath his cheek, although really it already feels almost numb with the cold of the mud now coating it. In the flickering firelight, he can see that Thursday’s staring out ahead, expression hard and tense as a man about to step into the line of fire. His hat is missing and his hair’s fallen in his face – it’s the most dishevelled Morse has ever seen him look.

“Inspector Thursday? Morse? Inspector Thursday?!” It’s Jakes’ voice, oddly enough, that moves Thursday. He shakes himself, blinking, and then raises his weight cautiously from the ground. Morse groans and drags himself a few inches away before slowly doing the same. 

Pushing himself up, Morse can see the four oil drums are still spewing flames, casting the entire lot into shadowy, flickering fire-light. It feels almost like a theatre set: something unreal, staged. Jakes and Strange come running up like a pair of extras, shock and concern almost comically over-acted. It’s only when Strange’s voice cuts through the ringing in his ears – “You alright, matey?” – that the shock-induced illusion disappears and Morse tumbles back into reality with a jolt. He turns himself the rest of the way over, left hip and shoulder aching, into an awkward position between crouching and kneeling. Strange comes to a stop at his elbow, open face stamped with concern. Morse stares at him.

“I – what? Yes. Yes, fine. He went that way. That way,” gestures Morse, more strongly, when Strange doesn’t move. He pulls himself up to his feet with Strange’s help – beside him, Jakes already has Thursday up – and points. “He ran a line of gasoline between each drum; chain explosion. And he went that way,” he repeats, pointedly.

Strange takes a reluctant step in the indicated direction, and Morse nods impatiently. Jakes heads off as well, and with less hesitation is soon leading the pair. 

Morse turns to Thursday, just in time to catch the Inspector staring at him with wide eyes. Thursday turns away sharply towards the remains of the barrels, his hands fisting and unfisting as if testing strength or reflexes. “Wipe your face off,” is all he says, voice terse. 

Morse slowly raises a hand to his muddy cheek, puzzled, then digs a handkerchief out of his pocket and scrubs. The burning sensation tells him he’s scraped the skin enough to bleed; the red mixed in with the brown in his handkerchief confirms it. 

Something is off with Thursday, something more than shock. He’s breathing hard, and his movements are short and jerky and constant: he can’t seem to keep still. When he looks back to Morse there’s an expression on his face that Morse can’t place, a mix between driven and desperate. His hair is still in his face, long and lank, and he hasn’t even looked for his hat. 

So when Thursday says, “Ready, then?” rather than agreeing, Morse raises a hand to rub at his temple.

“Actually, sir, I’m feeling a bit dizzy. Think I might’ve hit my head.” He moves towards Thursday and his legs actually do shake, although more from the twinge in his left knee caused by the impact with the ground than from weakness. 

Thursday’s hand shoots out snake-swift and latches onto Morse’s elbow, other arm stretching out towards Morse’s side to catch Morse if he should fall. His movements are overly quick and extreme for Morse’s minor stumble. 

Apparently recognizing the overreaction, he withdraws his hand almost immediately, catching Morse’s surprised eye and giving a humourless quirk of his lips. He steps back slowly to a more comfortable distance, and pats his pockets. 

“They take you by surprise, sometimes, the memories,” he says after a moment, producing his pipe and pouch. “A word, a phrase, the smell of sand and gunpowder. Just the look on the greengrocer’s boy’s face, once, and I was back at Taranto with wet boots and the artillery going overhead. Bloody great explosions, though, that’s new.” Thursday lights his pipe, returning the lighter and pouch to his pocket, then passes a hand over his forehead. When he begins again it’s in a calmer, more detached tone. 

“They shelled us at Cassino – smelled just like this, mud and grit and smoke. We dug in when we weren’t moving, sometimes full trenches, sometimes little more than scrapes like that one,” he nods at the shallow dip in the lee of the gravel heap he tackled Morse into. “We were experts at it by then, a right pack of gophers. We’d come up all the way through North Africa; plenty of replacements, but plenty of old faces, too.” 

In the soft firelight Thursday glances at Morse, then away again. “You’re a bit like one of them. A bloke called Thessinger. Just come down from Cambridge. He was quiet, too. Kept himself to himself, but always did his part. He joined up at El Alamein, as I recall, and pushed all the way up to Cassino with us.”

In the distance there’s a quiet peeping of police whistles, just on the edge of Morse’s hearing. Thursday doesn’t react, keeps on talking in his casual tone, and Morse can’t tell whether he’s heard them or not. He’s staring at one of the flaming drums, the fire dancing in his dark eyes. 

“They had the high ground – could spot any move we made. Artillery’d take up without notice, any time day or night. I just happened to be in a foxhole when it started, that day. Thessinger wasn’t, and he just stood there like a statue, right out in the open with this look of… of confused surprise on his face.” _Like the one on yours_ goes unsaid, but Morse reads it there all the same. 

“You’d see that sometimes – shock and exhaustion could freeze a man solid, even one who’d been through years of war. I’d just gotten myself out to grab him – was hardly an arms’ length away – when the shell landed. Next thing I knew he was lying there at my feet, staring up at me. If it hadn’t been for the blood on his face, I wouldn’t have known he’d even been hit.”

Morse’s fingers tighten on the bloody handkerchief in his pocket as Thursday reaches up to take his pipe with a shaking hand. He turns his head slowly to look at Morse, his eyes those of a man looking at someone twenty years in his past. Then Morse is moving with jerky haste, handkerchief falling forgotten towards the mud, because the Inspector’s knees are suddenly quaking alarmingly. 

He catches Thursday under the arm and helps him over to a pair of nearby cement blocks, setting him down on one and himself on the other. Thursday wipes his free hand across his face. “Christ.” He sits there, head bowed and buried in his hand, pipe hanging forgotten from the fingers of the other. Morse makes to reach out but stops, awkward and uncertain, and his arm falls away. He shifts his position instead to sit with his shoulder against Thursday’s, the pressure gentle but constant. 

They sit there in silence for a space of time measured solely by Morse’s hearing gradually returning; he gauges it by the crackling of the fires. Eventually Thursday pulls away with a long sigh, sitting up straighter on his own. He looks over toward Morse with eyes that are slightly red-rimmed, but focused in the present. “You moved pretty quick for someone too dizzy to walk,” he says.

“Must’ve worn off,” replies Morse, deadpan. 

“Very convenient,” says Thursday, in the same tone. 

“Sir –”

Thursday holds up a conciliatory hand, face softening. “That’ll do. I’ll ask no questions, you tell no lies. How’s that?”

Morse smiles gently, weaving his fingers together and resting his chin on them. “Agreed.”

Over Thursday’s shoulder, Jakes appears from around the corner of the alley moving at a good clip, the pleased expression on his face visible even at a distance. Thursday, catching Morse’s gaze, turns to follow the line of it. He sighs and pushes himself up slowly, returning his pipe to his mouth.

“Right then. Back to the job. And Morse?”

Morse also rises to his feet, alert and attentive. “Yes, sir?”

“See if you can’t find my hat, would you?”

END


End file.
